peerspective: integrating social networks and web search

Over the last decade, the rise of the World Wide Web and the emergence of Web search engines have fundamentally
transformed the way people exchange information. Recently, a new form of publishing and locating information, dubbed
social networking, has become enormously popular. Unlike the Web, whose hyper-linked structure has received
significant attention and has been exploited for searching content, the structure of information exchange over these
social networks is not well understood. In PeerSpective, we integrate social network search with Web search, allowing
you to search over your friends' viewed web pages.

WHAT DOES PEERSPECTIVE DO?
PeerSpective uses the shared interest between you and your friends to help
guide Web search. When you run a Google search, PeerSpective includes extra results which may be
relevant to your question alongside the results from Google. For example, PeerSpective can naturally disambiguate
between multiple definitions of ambigious terms: if you search for a friend named 'Peter' in PeerSpective, you're
likely to get your friend's homepage, instead of the homepage of Peter Gabriel from Google.

HOW DOES PEERSPECTIVE WORK?
PeerSpective works by indexing all web content you browse to, and then querying your friends' PeerSpective
proxies when you run a Google search. Since these is often shared interest between you a your friends,
PeerSpective takes advantage of this to select relevant pages to each Web search you run. The PeerSpective proxy runs
on your desktop, so you have complete control over your proxy, and you can leave the system at any time.

HOW DOES PEERSPECTIVE FIND MY FRIENDS?
PeerSpective is built on to of Skype, and talks only to your Skype contacts who are also running PeerSpective.
Using Skype means you don't have to tell PeerSpective who your friends are - it uses your existing Skype contacts. You simply
need to run Skype in the background and PeerSpective will discover and communicate with Skype. Additionally, PeerSpective will
communicate between multiple machines running PeerSpective with the same Skype username. This allows you to search over your
web browsing history across multiple machines.

CAN I DOWNLOAD PEERSPECTIVE? Yes, you are welcome to try out PeerSpective. Since
PeerSpective is an ongoing research project at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, we are slowly expanding
our user base. PeerSpective is currently in beta status, but you are welcome to try it out. Note that you will need friends
on Skype who are also running PeerSpective in order to have the search query multiple people.